Food Security Paper 102209

Policy Paper

October 2009

InterAction Food Security and Agriculture Working Group Response to the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative Consultation Document For more information, please contact: Vanessa Dick Senior Legislative Associate for International Development InterAction [email protected] Brian Greenberg Director of Sustainable Development InterAction [email protected] Lindsay Coates Vice President Policy and Communications InterAction [email protected]

www.InterAction.org 1400 16th Street, NW Suite 210 Washington, DC 20036 202-667-8227

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nterAction’s Food Security and Agriculture Working Group (FS/Ag WG) applauds the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative for strengthening and expanding its global food security draft strategy. We are especially pleased that the document is consistent with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) framework and identifies a reduction in chronic hunger, under-nutrition, and poverty as the purpose of development assistance. The stated goals “to sustainably reduce chronic hunger, raise the incomes of the rural poor, and reduce the number of children suffering from under nutrition “ are in full accord with the longtime work of InterAction member NGOS and we welcome the new partnership that this approach promises. The draft strategy also increases its chances for success by broadening its approach to include a continuum of hunger-fighting programs: food aid, nutrition, safety nets, and agricultural development. Also praiseworthy are the call for increased, long term funding commitments and an ‘equally strong’ allocation between food aid and agricultural development; an intention to address the challenges faced by women farmers (as producers and nutrition providers); the emphasis on country-led and community-led strategies; the recognition of child nutritional status as a pivotal indicator of well-being; and the shift toward multilateralism with the acknowledgement that the US ‘can’t do it alone’. In order to strengthen the strategy, we respectfully ask that it address the following:

Whole of Government Approach: To integrate, strengthen, and coalesce current US government hunger programs it will require leadership that understands the challenges to coordinating a complex international development and humanitarian relief program across US government entities. This leadership must be able to rise above the political landscape and instead focus on the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative. For this reason we ask for: • a refined definition of the food security coordinator position and role, including a mandate that explains how it will fold into larger foreign assistance efforts, thereby reducing complexity and consolidating interventions; • clarification on how policy coordination and programs will be strengthened across agencies of the US government to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of efforts in food security, nutrition, and agriculture; and, • investments in regenerating technical and planning capacity within USAID to ensure it is capable of acting as the lead development agency and primary institutional resource for the food security coordinator.

Strengthening Development Partnerships, Especially with NGOs: Strengthened partnerships with the NGO community to achieve common development goals will result in expanded impacts that get at the root of hunger and poverty alleviation. These partnerships should extend beyond a consultative role, and prominently feature civil society organizations in leveraging resources, articulating strategy, building capacity, and implementing pro-

grams. NGOs are best positioned to reach the most vulnerable and this comparative advantage should be maximized.

Working Together: The Country Led Strategy, Community Led Development, ‘Investment Plans’ and the Interagency Global Hunger and Food Security Strategy: The Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative rightly prescribes a range of strategic frameworks. Nonetheless, all should have a consistent set of development investment priorities, avoiding competing frameworks. In addition, the development planning and budgeting process should be restructured to support strategic, multi-year, transparent planning and implementation. To realize the multi-stakeholder participatory ideals assumed in a ‘country led’ strategy and ‘community led’ development, support should be provided for capacity building in governance, decentralization and community empowerment. Capacity for ‘community-led’ development depends not just on the technologies and market systems now prioritized in the strategy, but on human and social capital. Investments in building human capital must be done at all levels including producers, value chain participants, those providing extension services (both traditional and non-traditional), government officials and those in academia. The dissemination of information and building of knowledge must not be limited to single subjects, but presented in a holistic manner. Maintain flexibility in the plan for ‘pre-investment’ countries to support a range of capacity building and other activities that are essential precursors to an actual plan. Strengthen financial transparency and accountability mechanisms to address risks of corruption in country led approaches. Build civil society and governance capacity to create norms and demand for accountability to in country stakeholders.

World Bank Food Security Trust Fund: Clarify and strengthen the promising concept of a food security trust fund. Explain how a fund managed by the World Bank would be structured to avoid the governance, accountability, social protections, transparency constraints and lengthy delays that often typify World Bank managed funds. Clarify how country-determined development priorities would be congruent with the pattern of external priorities often associated with World Bank lending. Identify a meaningful role for civil society—including the full range from governance to implementing partners—within the World Bank Food Security Trust Fund.

Monitoring and Evaluation: • Strengthen mechanisms for accountability and transparency linked to M & E systems. • Base M & E systems on existing strong USAID guidance in documents such as the draft MYAP FY 10 guidelines. • Please provide a more complete list of evaluation indica2

tors; our community has extensive experience in program evaluation which we would like to share. ◊ Base key indicators for the effectiveness of programs on the MDGs—especially Goal 1—to ensure the focus remains on poverty reduction and reduced hunger. ◊ Carefully track the nutritional status of children under 5 years of age to maintain focus on that period of acute vulnerability. • Clarify what is meant by ‘increasing the impact of humanitarian assistance’. Through which indicators would progress toward increased impact be measured? • Identify indicators and targets linked to each goal to add clarity to the strategic framework.

Nutrition: • Use country selection criteria and processes that ensure this initiative reaches the countries where the greatest number of stunted children live. • Integrate dietary quality into programs in smallholder agriculture, nutrition and food security. • Address food availability, access, utilization and stability in nutrition and food security interventions. ◊ Feature food processing, storage, and preparation (including availability of fuel) in a strategy for improved nutrition since these are critical to dietary quality. ◊ Focus on under-nutrition as well as malnutrition. Track diet quality through indicators such as vitamin A, calcium and iron. • Structure nutrition programs to respond to the disadvantages in intra-household food allocation often faced by women and girls. • Address urban and peri-urban hunger and food insecurity in the current strategy in light of the large number of vulnerable people in those areas. • Promote program links across sectors with clear synergies, such as nutrition, agriculture, health, (HIV/AIDS, maternal & child) and education. • Ensure that specialized production for markets does ‘no harm’ to dietary diversity or the nutritional status of communities.

Food Aid: • Explore opportunities to strengthen in-kind flexibilities and resilience through pre-positioning, replenishment, incountry reserves. • Better explicate and expand the role that developmental food aid can have in meeting food security needs. • Improve the nutritional quality of food aid.

Environmental Regeneration and Natural Resource Management: • Prioritize regeneration of agricultural resources in the many places where environmental degradation now reduces production and incomes.

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◊ Support alternative techniques such as ecological agriculture that hold potential for significant yield increases and improved NRM. ◊ Direct and equip extension services, universities and research institutions to vigorously re-orient themselves to support sustainable agriculture. Revise the strategy’s current technical emphasis on boosting production through intensive irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide inputs because these often underpin unsustainable resource use. Encourage genetic diversity and use of local seed varieties in the many circumstances where hybrid seeds are not available, affordable or viable without intensive irrigation and other inputs. Base the global hunger and food security strategy on existing strong USAID guidance on environmental protection such as the draft MYAP FY 10 guidelines. Shift the strategy away from the distinction between production and nutrition to an integrated approach. Respond to climate change as a major risk for rural livelihoods, food security and agriculture by much more thoroughly integrating it into all areas of the strategy.

Safety Nets: • Better define and explain the envisioned safety net programs. Incorporate much more complete and long term safety net program approaches and mechanisms into the strategy. • Clarify what ‘increasing the impact’ of food aid and safety net programs means. • Build social protection and safety nets at the local/community level through NGOs and other appropriate implementers. Avoid reliance on the World Bank fund or other initiative to address this need. • Incorporate agricultural yield insurance into social protection mechanisms. • Help countries create safety net systems that help prevent the economically vulnerable from falling into destitution in the wake of shocks.

Agriculture: • Incorporate strategies for addressing the heterogeneity of small holder farmers, from subsistence to small scale commercial producers, from agriculturalists to pastoralists. • Build and strengthen farmer-owned and controlled institutions. Enable coops, producer groups, farmer associations, cooperative development associations and NGOs—which already play key roles in providing information and advice—to reach much greater numbers of farmers. • Promote increased diversity in production systems to better distribute labor demands and improve nutrition. Promote better integration between diversified crop, livestock and agro-forestry systems to improve productivity

and reduce environmental degradation. • Support the wide range of non-agricultural livelihood and income strategies rural communities have adopted to reduce poverty and strengthen agricultural markets. • Reprioritize the current emphasis on crop production technologies to address other technical challenges—such as communications, energy and water—that constrain rural livelihoods and agriculture. ◊ Emphasize labor saving technologies to reduce the time burden on women and children from tasks such as collection and carrying of potable water.

Research, Extension and Education: • Re-balance the strategy’s emphasis on technical production aspects of agriculture by investing much more heavily in human and social capital through education. Focus on the knowledge and information needs of small scale farmers in supporting educational systems that directly serve them. • Re-prioritize technical, research and educational priorities to recognize that market access and small enterprise development is often as great a challenge for small scale farmers and rural value chains as low productivity. • Re-focus research priorities in universities and research institutions away from publications and ‘cutting edge’ science toward addressing constraints faced by smallholder farmers and the poor. ◊ Shift the focus of the CGIAR centers, for example, away from commodity-based research toward food security and food systems. ◊ Re-emphasize water management, agro-forestry and low external input methods of regenerating soil fertility that will be essential to boosting the productivity of resource poor producers. • Expand the range of approaches to extension, information and advisory services much beyond often-moribund state extension services and private sector services that often offer information only on a limited range of commercial inputs. ◊ NGOs, coops, producer groups and farmer associations all play important roles that could be strengthened and expanded to reach much greater numbers of farmers. ◊ Encourage and incorporate the broad range of applied and program research undertaken by farmer associations and NGOs—on ‘best practices’, etc.—into the information stream shaping field programs. • Focus not only on higher education in agriculture, but on basic education and literacy—especially for women—as a primary strategy for increasing incomes, reducing hunger, improving health status and boosting agricultural growth. • Ensure greatly increased numbers of women extension workers are recruited to engage women facing social confinement or limited mobility. 3

Markets: • Create expanded market access for small scale farmers and farmer-owned institutions by recognizing that coops greatly help to achieve that in many circumstances. • Strengthen the sections of the strategy on markets to clarify that the inefficiency of entire value chains is frequently a constraint worthy of program interventions. • Support the development of small and medium enterprises to generate employment, income and improve the functioning of markets and value chains. • Balance local, regional and international market development to take advantage of opportunities for growth at all scales. ◊ Support export-led strategies only when they are demonstrably in the interest of poverty reduction and improved food security. ◊ Ensure that official development assistance is not used to create opportunities for already wealthy producers and processors most likely to benefit directly from export-led growth in trade. • Address the mix of constraints that limit the movement of surplus food to deficit regions, such as market failures, weak infrastructure, administrative barriers and obstacles to trade.

Financial Services: • Structure programs to address the cost and affordability of financial services, including savings, insurance and credit. • Provide necessary enterprise or livelihood training for credit recipients to ensure loans result in productive gains rather than burdensome debt. • Address the barriers to credit and market participation rather than simply increasing opportunities for access.

Gender: • Strengthen, clarify and expand the section on gender. • Adopt and consistently follow a ‘gender’ perspective rather than simply citing ‘women’. • Separate the discussion of the status and challenges of ‘women’ from those of the ‘poor’. • Make ‘gender’ a cross-cutting strategic element, incorporating it into other aspects of the strategy. Retain a section dedicated to gender issues in food security and agriculture. • Incorporate approaches to working with men to address social, economic and legal issues underlying the disadvantaged status of women. ◊ Avoid reliance on solutions to gender bias such as ‘engaging in dialogue’ with men since the cultural roots of patriarchy and male privilege will likely not be fundamentally reshaped in that way. Instead, engage men around the structural changes—such as land ownership, inheritance, financial management and social mobility—needed to improve the status of women and create viable lasting change. 4

• Base the gender integration strategy on existing strong USAID guidance such as the draft MYAP FY 10 guidelines. • Beyond a program ‘focus’ on women, allocate resources to the development needs of women proportional to their number and prominent role in agricultural production and in household nutrition, health and food security. • Use terminology such as the needs of ‘men and women’ farmers, and follow those differing needs into program strategies that respond to both. • Structure programs to reach adolescent and young women, whose social status is often more disadvantaged than that of adult women.

Social and Community Development: • Invest in decentralized capacity building for communities—education, infrastructure and governance—rather than simply in central governments. • Clarify the meaning and mechanisms of “communitybased” in the strategy. Ensure the participation of beneficiary groups and communities through a local process of priority setting and decision making leading to ‘community led’ development. • Support NGOs, farmer associations, and other communitybased groups that provide “bridging capital” by empowering communities to articulate their interests and link more advantageously to governments. • Prioritize conflict resolution in the many countries where conflict poses significant risks to stability and increased prosperity. • Establish a consistent and open process for identifying ‘stakeholders’; enable meaningful stakeholder participation identification of country needs and the formation of country strategies. InterAction understands the challenge in developing a global food security strategy that is both sustainable and effective. Our membership represents a tremendous amount of expertise in international development and humanitarian relief issues and we appreciate this opportunity to provide feedback. We look forward to working with you throughout this process and please let us know how we can be most helpful.